The Handmaid’s Tale

The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian story – one about an imagined place that is undesirable – written by Canadian author Margaret Atwood and first published in 1985.

Dystopian novels often feature totalitarian governments, and this story is no exception. In the United States of the near future, an extreme Christian theocracy rules. The government seems to be constantly at war, although we don’t directly witness this in the urban setting of the novel. The society’s problems are compounded by the fact that not many people are able to give birth (no kids, no soldiers!) The few women that are fertile are rounded up, indoctrinated to become ‘handmaids’ and given to prominent members of the military dictatorship as reproductive slaves.

Being a prominent work of science (or speculative) fiction, The Handmaid’s Tale is an apt choice for an investigation into literature and contexts. Anti-totalitarian dystopian novels flourished in the 20th century, including such famous stories as 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451. The work gives insight into issues surrounding religion, government and subjugation of women and was written at a time of conservative religious revival, marked by such events as the election of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA. The setting of the novel portrays the antithesis of the feminist sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s, with males in complete control of women and their sexual lives. In one article Margaret Atwood herself explains that her story is “a study of power, and how it operates and how it deforms or shapes the people who are living within that kind of regime” (Rothstein, 1986).

As an example of interesting style, The Handmaid’s Tale provides a plethora of techniques to investigate. The story is told in an unconventional narrative structure, alternating between memories of the past and present. The first-person narrator herself seems somewhat unreliable and speaks mostly in present tense. She often employs a stream of consciousness style that is sometimes dispassionate, factual and resigned in tone. It contains taboo subject matter. Visual imagery and symbols often have allusions to the bible and other dystopian stories. Neologisms (made up words) are frequently used. The list goes on and on!  Check out Cliffnotes for some more.

I hope we will enjoy reading and discussing this novel together!  Check out some of the resources below to help you with your investigation.

RESOURCES

• Sparknotes. This resource provides an in-depth and comprehensive summary of the novel’s context, plot and analysis. It is a useful resource, but try to form your own ideas and opinions about the text before going here.
• Shmoop. This site is much the same as Sparknotes, but written in a more accessible style. For ideas it is great, but don’t emulate the casual written style in your own essays!

Pageantry Discussion

As you know, we will be reading Beth Henley's play The Miss Firecracker Contest. 

The Miss Firecracker Contest is a Southern literature play written by Beth Henley. It was originally produced in Los Angeles in 1980 at the Victory Theater directed by Maria Gobetti. It got a production at the Manhattan Theatre Club off-Broadway in 1984 directed by Stephen Tobolowsky, who was Henley's romantic partner at the time. It moved to a larger off-Broadway house, the Westbank Theater, where it ran for a year. Although not as popular as Henley's Crimes of the Heart, The Miss Firecracker Contest has been generally well received among critics. Set in Brookhaven, Mississippi, the play explores the themes of femininity, beauty, and the need to be accepted.

Bell Work: Before looking at any articles and reading the play, what are your thoughts on beauty pageants? Do you support them? 


Additional Questions: What is your take on Donald Trump's history with pageants? (He owned the Miss USA pageant up until recently.) Did anyone march this weekend? What about pageants for children? What message does that send? What are your thoughts on Barbie and the message she sends? Would you let your child play with Barbies? Did you play with them when you were young?



Resources on Pageantry

NY Times Opinion Section

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/09/12/is-the-miss-america-pageant-bad-for-women/beauty-pageants-like-the-miss-america-contest-should-die

New Republic

https://newrepublic.com/article/117025/beauty-pageants-have-become-way-begin-career-politics

Washington Post Miss World

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/miss-world-is-the-biggest-beauty-pageant-youve-never-heard-of-whats-it-doing-in-washington/2016/12/16/d7c9a46a-c150-11e6-9578-0054287507db_story.html?utm_term=.8bce214cef56

PBS-race

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/missamerica/peopleevents/e_inclusion.html

PBS History of pageants

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/missamerica/peopleevents/e_origins.html

PBS

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/missamerica/peopleevents/e_beauty.html

Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDPCmmZifE8

You tube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYjY2eEc9KI

Steel Magnolias

Steel Magnolias is a play written by American Author,  Robert Harling in 1987. The play is about the bond a group of women share in a small-town southern community and how they cope with the death of one of their own. This play addresses many important feminist themes, which we will discuss in class.


The story is based on Harling's real life experience of the death of his sister, Susan Harling Robinson, in 1985 due to complications from Type 1 diabetes. He changed his sister's name in the story from Susan to Shelby Eatenton-Latcherie.


The title suggests the main female characters can be both as delicate as the magnolia flower, and as tough as steel.

Some of the names of people and places in the play may be difficult to pronounce. Here is a link that has most of the pronunciations as they are intended to sound: http://dialectsarchive.com/steel-magnolias

The Women's Liberation Movement, Gloria Steinem, and "If Men Could Menstruate"

Introduction

The Women’s Liberation Movement, beginning approximately in 1968 and continuing through 1982, was a fundamentally life-changing phenomenon that changed the way women thought about themselves and the way they were treated in all facets of American society. Growing out of the major movements of the 1950’s and 1960’s, the modern women’s movement was a natural development in the wave of societal change that encompassed civil rights causes for multiple minority groups and the activist efforts to end the Vietnam War.

Women were involved in all of these causes, just as they were important participants in the 19th century abolitionist movement. Like those early pioneers of women’s rights of the 19th century, women in the 1960’s found that they were treated as second-class citizens within those high-minded activist communities. Movement women were often relegated to menial tasks while men of the counterculture made most the decisions, did most of the writing, and participated in most of the public actions. Women saw other oppressed peoples in America being liberated, saw parallels with their own lives, and started to wonder what about liberation for themselves.

Betty Friedan’s 1963 ground-breaking book, The Feminine Mystique, an expose on the dissatisfaction of roles women were largely boxed into in post-war America, planted the initial seeds for a reevaluation of how women saw themselves and how society shaped their sense of self. Activist women gradually separated themselves from the New Left and formed their own Women’s Liberation Movement. Through innovative experiments in consciousness-raising groups and writings about feminist thought, women activists raised a host of new causes that radically altered the way women perceived themselves and the ways society treated them.

Concepts like birth control, abortion, and reproductive rights, normally swept under the proverbial rug, were discussed openly and publicly. Issues that existed but lacked even a name were brought forth and analyzed, including sexism, sexual harassment, sex discrimination, and domestic violence. Using guerilla theatre and other art-based tactics from 1960’s activism, and utilizing the power of the media, the legislature, the courts, and public opinion, women won important gains in areas such as the workplace, the military, education, sports, healthcare, organized religion, and even home life. Women also took the initiative in addressing problems like rape, battery, and child molestation by setting up rape crisis centers, battery shelters, and emergency hotlines that provided safe spaces and information networks that could aid victimized and neglected women. By the 1980’s women had achieved a revolution of the mind and a revolution of societal status that would forever alter how they would live in American society.

Gloria Steinem

Today's Women's Activist/Author is Gloria Steinem. She is an American feminist, journalist, and social and political activist, who became nationally recognized as a leader and a spokeswoman for the feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Please take a look at her website to familiarize yourself with her.

http://www.gloriasteinem.com/about

The Comparative Element: A Magazine Article

“If Men Could Menstruate,” a 1978 magazine article by Gloria Steinem

Today we are going to read, discuss, and analyze the above magazine article as an extension of understanding the challenges women faced in self-actualization. You should should compare the ideas of the article with the other writing pieces we have looked at in class. Topics for discussion might include the following:

• What do you think the point of this article was?
• How do you feel about the article's arguments?
• How does Steinem use humor to present serious points?
• What are your thoughts about the concept of men being able to menstruate?
• How does men’s behavior reflect back onto how women are seen and treated?
• What is Steinem saying about those in power and those who are powerless?

A Letter for Future Generations

Bell Work: Are we feeling any better today? Has it all sunk in?

Essential Question: How will writing a letter to the future generation heal us? How does this connect to the letters written by Abigail Adams? What about the letter written by Aaron Sorkin?

Introduction

1. Discuss the response to yesterday's results across the nation.
2. What ways can we come together as a community?
3. Thoughts on the peaceful transition of power? What do you think those meetings will be like?

Work Time

1. Read Aaron Sorkin's letter to his daughter found here: http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/11/aaron-sorkin-donald-trump-president-letter-daughter

2. Write your own letter. More details can be found on Google Classroom.

Closure
Turn in assignments. Have a healing weekend. Put good in the world.

The Women's Right Movement

5 Things to Know about the Women’s Rights Movement

1. Abigail Adams forecast the quest for women’s equality in her “Remember the Ladies” letter to her husband, John Adams, stating, “I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.” [Note: If you wind up writing about this letter on the Regents, call attention to the fact that you TRANSCRIBED the letter in class.]

2. In 1848, approximately 300 women and men gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, for the Seneca Falls Convention, a major meeting convened to discuss women’s rights, including the right to vote.  Among the attendees were Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and former slave Frederick Douglass.  Cady Stanton, with input from Mott and Jane Hunt, wrote and delivered the “Declaration of Sentiments.”  Although one of Cady Stanton’s and others’ demands was women’s right to vote, not all attendees agreed on this point.  In the end, 100 of the 300 “ratified” (approved) the Declaration (68 women & 32 men).  Cady Stanton and Douglass signed; Mott had reservations about the document’s inclusion of the demand for women’s suffrage, but in the end was the first to sign the Declaration.  [Review text of the “Declaration” and recall that it imitates the “Declaration of Independence.”]

3. Those fighting for women’s right to vote (also known as “suffrage” or “franchise”) were called suffragettes.  All women—not just Caucasians—gained that right when the 19th Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution in 1920.

4. In 1923, Alice Paul proposed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).  Here is the text:

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

In 1972, the ERA finally got the required 2/3 majority vote in both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives, and a deadline for the required 3/4 of the 50 states’ approval by individual state legislatures was set for 1979.  35 states approved the amendment—just three states short of the necessary 38—but five of those states wound up rescinding by the time the deadline arrived.  President Jimmy Carter signed a three-year extension, moving the deadline to 1982, but no additional states approved the amendment, so the ERA fell to the wayside.

In 1972, Australian-American pop singer Helen Reddy releases “I Am Woman,” a hit song that becomes the anthem for the women’s movement.

Common Application

Bell Work: Discussion about the second debate. We will specifically look at Donald Trump's approach to the debate (non-verbal cues).


http://qz.com/805148/second-debate-donald-trump-looming-behind-hillary-clinton/
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/donald-trump-second-debate-looming-over-clinton-video


Work Time
1. Continued discussion on writing a college essay.
2. Look at Common App Questions (posted on Google Classroom for you)
3. Look more closely at questions and some examples of responses to those questions. If you know which question you would like to choose, you can begin brainstorming early. Is anyone using the new Coalition Application?
4. Ask Questions